The Land Before Time (1988)

The year is 1988. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two men who between them had already monetized wonder several times over, attach their names to a Don Bluth production about young dinosaurs fleeing famine. The template is Bambi, which is to say the template is grief. Littlefoot's mother dies in the first act, the earth splits open, and a generation of children is quietly traumatized in service of a lesson about cooperation. This is craft. It is also, by the standards of the current cultural moment, almost entirely innocent of the various progressive pieties that now accompany such projects.

The one area of interest is the film's treatment of species prejudice. Bluth himself described the setup as racism: the herds teach their young to avoid other kinds, and Cera's father is the mechanism of that inheritance. It is a real theme and it is handled with restraint, which is why it registers as a modest entry and not a sermon. Elsewhere there is little to log. The voice cast is white and the characters are dinosaurs, which moots the question of representation entirely. No gender critique surfaces. The famine and the earthquakes are geological and dramatic, not environmentalist. Nobody critiques the means of production in the Great Valley.

The moral instruction here is of an older, gentler variety. Teamwork, courage, the value of odd companions. These ideas arrive folded into the story instead of announced over it, and the film never stops to explain itself to the audience. A viewer accustomed to being told what to feel may find the approach almost negligent. For the rest of us it is a relief, and it leaves the picture sitting comfortably near the floor of the scale, an artifact from a time when a children's film could simply be sad and call that sufficient.